Overview
Ichor Medical Systems has developed a powerful, patented technology for delivery of nucleic acids. Ichor’s proprietary TriGrid™ Delivery System (TDS) has demonstrated the ability to use electroporation to harness the potential of DNA drugs. In vivo studies using Ichor’s TriGrid™ technology have resulted in increased DNA drug delivery efficiency by up to 1,000-fold in animal models versus delivery of naked DNA alone. Moreover, preclinical data using TDS / DNA delivery indicate that TDS / DNA delivery efficiency is preserved as the scale of the species increases. However, gene expression from the same dose of DNA administered to higher species without TDS decreases as body mass increases.

Infectious Disease Vaccines
Ichor is advancing a rapid response anthrax vaccine toward the clinic with applications in both pre- and post-exposure settings. Ichor has shown that anthrax Protective Antigen (PA) delivered by TDS induces antibody responses to anthrax PA in mice and rabbits. TDS / PA also provides protection against in vivo challenge with anthrax toxin by inducing neutralizing antibodies in both species.

Grant funding for the anthrax program is advancing development of Ichor’s entire vaccine platform, which the company will apply to a range of additional infectious disease vaccines, including chronic viral hepatitis, AIDS/human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, and surgery patients at risk of hospital-acquired infections.

Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines
Ichor is pursuing an opportunity to play a significant role in the emerging therapeutic cancer vaccine market. These products are designed to inhibit tumor recurrence and/or metastasis by inducing the patient’s immune system to attack any residual cancer cells remaining after initial surgery, radiotherapy, or chemotherapy. The first indications that our therapeutic cancer vaccine programs will target are melanoma, breast and prostate cancer. The TDS platform holds great potential to enable multiple therapeutic cancer vaccines to extend survival and increase quality of life for cancer patients. Ichor’s approach holds many advantages over other cancer vaccine and immunotherapy approaches. These advantages include:

• Ability to elicit cellular as well as humoral response
• Ability to elicit multi-specific immune response
• Ability to incorporate multiple antigens
• Ability to re-administer without loss of efficiency seen in viral vector delivery

Therapeutic Proteins
Ichor’s TriGrid platform is enabling for applications where sustained endogenous production of a therapeutic protein is desirable to correct a disease state. TDS / DNA drugs provide endogenous production of the DNA encoded protein to yield steady, long-term serum protein levels from a single administration, not possible with injectable recombinant proteins.

Ichor is advancing a program toward the clinic to deliver an improved interferon-β treatment for multiple sclerosis patients. Because of sustained protein expression, TDS / interferon-β may be dosed as infrequently as three or four times per year. This is unlike recombinant interferon-β which is dosed as frequently as three times per week. This provides substantial improvement in convenience as well as dose-sparing efficiency, which will also result in lower overall cost of treatment.